That young, developing athletes might be involved with seeking out taking performance-enhancing drugs shouldn't come as a surprise. PED use among high schoolers is an issue high school athletic associations and policymakers have wrestled with for years. The competitive streak that leads athletes to seek an edge in a bottle or needle, alas, does not start at the pro level.

From the Miami Herald:

Fischer has not made any names public, but said at least a dozen student names are listed in the clinic’s records for 2011 alone — largely baseball players from St. Brendans, Gulliver, Columbus and South Miami high schools, he said.

“This was never about professional ballplayers, or stars — this was about criminal activity and injecting underage athletes,” said Fischer, who contacted the Florida Department of Health after he had a falling-out with [clinic founder Anthony] Bosch over money earlier this year.

Fischer said a state health investigator opened an inquiry and confirmed through interviews with others at the clinic that Bosch was injecting minors with steroid “concoctions.” Yet the investigation went nowhere.

...

In the end, Bosch was fined $5,000 from the state Department of Health for practicing medicine without a license. ... [S]ince there was no criminal case, the Miami state attorney said she had nothing to prosecute.

ESPN piece quoted Fischer as saying he saw 16- and 17-year-olds "regularly" come to Biogenesis, often brought by their fathers, to be injected with human growth hormone, testosterone, or other performance enhancers.

ESPN also identified two high school players as the sons of Lazaro Collazo, a longtime college baseball pitching coach, high school coach and academy leader in the Miami area. According to ESPN, Fischer and an unidentified former Biogenesis employee said Collazo "brought his sons and other minors to the clinic for treatment."

Reached by "Outside the Lines," Collazo several weeks ago said he never received PEDs from Bosch and that he does not know why his and his sons' names would be in Biogenesis records. He could not be reached for comment Friday."I just don't know," he said. "Look, I'm being polite, but you keep asking me things I don't know about. I never got anything from Tony Bosch."...

A few states have tried requiring high school athletes be tested for steroids, but the efforts have proven fruitless, with millions of dollars being spent to find zero or single-digit positive tests. Maybe the kids were smart about how not to get caught, although hopefully some of the reason for the limited positives is that most studies show only about 5 percent of young athletes admitting to trying PEDs -- not insignificant, but not everybody-does-it either.

Still, it's not hard to see what can motivate young athletes, and their parents, would be motivated, however wrongly, to try PEDs. There is always pressure to run faster and get stronger, and if a little extra something can make the difference between starting and sitting, or a scholarship and no scholarship, someone is going to be tempted to do it. There is evidence as far back as the third century, B.C., that athletes juiced.

There's a message that comes when some of a sport's most prominent players, such as Braun and Rodriguez, are tied up in PED scandals, but it's not always the one Major League Baseball wants everyone to hear. Some may just hear MLB's message that the juicing players are cheaters who aren't representative of players' conduct as a whole. But others may hear that it's a requirement to get an artificial boost to get to the highest level of sport, and stay there.